Toward a Better Country

Ruth 1:16-17

Where you go, I will go; and where you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May Yahweh do so to me, and more also, if anything but death parts you and me.

It seems to me that every day God tells us that he loves us more than anyone in the world, and asks whom we love. Yet we answer that we love the world. He tells us that he is the Creator of the world, and that if we would say just once that we love him, he would give us everything in it; still we go on giving the same answer, that we love the world.

To the Reader

What struck me as I looked at Ruth was this: she had lived without knowing God at all, but as she heard about him from Naomi, she came to see that he is the living God, and when God asked her, she answered that she loved him.

Because God loved Naomi, he gave her a husband and two sons, but when hardship came, they left God and turned their backs on Israel. Taking foreign women as daughters-in-law, they seemed for a time to enjoy peace, but in that land Naomi lost her husband and her two sons, who had been God’s true blessing to her.

To the Reader

Toward a Better Country

It was then that God asked Ruth. When he told her that he loved her and asked whom she loved, Ruth, unlike Naomi, made the good choice: she chose God. As a foreign woman, Ruth had no claim to be counted among God’s people, yet God was comforted by her choice and granted her the privilege of becoming one of his own. This is how different God’s thoughts are from ours.

Though Ruth had no claim to it, God blessed her so that she became one of the people of Israel, and he spared nothing in helping her become an ancestor of faith. This is the heart of God.

God does not ask much of us. There is nothing we can do for him. Just as God used Ruth as a stepping stone so that Jesus could come to this earth, we serve only as stepping stones in God’s work of salvation. Ruth became the mother of Israel’s forebears. If we who live in this age lean on God’s word as Ruth did and live it out, God will laugh aloud and bless us, telling us that the Kingdom of God has grown because of us.

My wish is that you will remember Ruth’s choice. Because of her good choice, Israel was able to carry on its line of faith, and in the end that choice became a link in the chain by which Jesus came to this earth. As I preached through the book of Ruth, I came to respect her choice deeply.

I hope that you too, like Ruth, will not resent the circumstances and the lot you have been given. At her lowest and most painful moment she made a good choice, and God took charge of the outcome. May you be a little child who smiles up at God and tells him that you love him. And may you, like Ruth, become one whom God approves for the fullness of your faith. Then God will pour out on you the overflowing blessing of receiving the Boaz, Obed, Jesse, and David he has prepared. I thank the members of Watercourse Church, who became one in heart to make this book, and the deacons of the publishing team, who made time in the midst of busy lives and gave their very best to bring it into print. Trusting in the word that tells us to preach the gospel to Samaria and to the ends of the earth, I offer this book.

May 2018
Cho Chun-sook, Pastor of Watercourse Church